Summit Series: TED Meets Burning Man

On a recent weekend, Barack Obama’s chief technology strategist, a prominent conservationist, and a supernatural mentalist — a professional mind reader — walked into a California ski lodge. In context, this was nothing unusual. Nearby stood Evan Williams, Twitter’s co-founder, and Gus Van Sant, the film director. The three-foot-tall motivational speaker Sean Stephenson sat in a vintage barber chair, getting his head shaved by a guy in suspenders beside a banner that read: “People Hate Us On Yelp.” The President of Georgia walked around in a parka with a security phalanx that traced his every movement like a school of minnows.

“A young TED meets Burning Man” is how one venture capitalist in attendance described this annual occasion, called Summit Series, and not just because Burning Man’s founder, Larry Harvey, was also there, giving a talk in a geodesic dome where science films and didgeridoo players played. This annual three-day conference, held this year at Resort at Squaw Creek, mashes together socially-minded entrepreneurs, scientists, entertainers and media people in the belief that with so much high functionality — and access to money and influence — in one place, very good things can come out of it.

“Summit Series is about character. It’s not about resumes. So show love to all the startups, and don’t fanboy the big-timers.”

“This is the greatest group of multidisciplinary world changers in the same place at the same time,” Jeff Rosenthal, Summit Series’s 27-year-old co-founder, told the 650 attendees at the opening plenary. “There is no other place on earth with a gathering of people with more unparalleled ambition to grow, do, be and achieve — so welcome.”

The event’s program blended high-mindedness (Panel: “How Entrepreneurs Can Solve the World’s Biggest Nutrition Deficits”) with mind expansion (“Lucid Dreaming Workshop”). Rosenthal talks about it as a “choose your own adventure”: there were yoga classes, Falconry 101 classes, and sets by Q-Tip, the former front man of A Tribe Called Quest. But like at Burning Man, say, where one can find himself sharing a ride on a fire-breathing dragon with the founder of Google, the eclectic content is designed to encourage spontaneous connections in unlikely places. The search engine Qwiki was founded at a past event, and won TechCrunch Disrupt the following year. Through Summit Series, the founders of Spotify met the tech entrepreneur Sean Parker, a connection that enabled the Sweden-based music streaming service to launch in the United States the following year. After last year’s event, held on a chartered cruise ship that sailed the Caribbean, Summit’s organizers raised $1 million to establish a marine protected area in the Bahamas.

“Our guards are lower here,” said Josh Felser, an early stage venture capitalist, on a shuttle bus the morning after a late night party that had been held at Squaw’s mid-mountain lodge, and deejayed by Questlove of The Roots. “There’s an openness to engage with anyone that wants to engage with you.” The previous day, Felser said, he had conceived of a healthcare startup, met an industry consultant in the hallway, and was on his way to pitch two entrepreneurs that he thought could launch it.

While getting his hair coiffed in a barbershop that had been set up in the middle of the conference, Scott Budnick, the executive producer of “The Hangover,” talked with Nicole Johnson, of the VC firm Founders Fund, about his work with troubled youth in Los Angeles. Johnson pledged to create an incubator the following week that would bring five youth to San Francisco, give them housing and mentors, and find them their first job with startups that she knew. Budnick then called people at the University of San Francisco, which agreed to admit the kids on full scholarships.

“So we have the education piece, the housing piece, the job training piece, and the mentor piece — all while laying back in a barbers chair at Summit Series,” Budnick later recalled. “And now I’m going to play poker with Phil Gordon (former host of “Celebrity Poker Showdown.”) I mean, when would that ever happen?”

The first Summit Series was held four years ago, in Park City, Utah. The organizers were four entrepreneurs in their early twenties — the founder of a jewelry company, a real estate newsletter publisher, an energy consultant, and a musician with his own record label — who thought of the ski trip as a way to connect with other like-minded young people that were running businesses. Nineteen people attended the first year, which the organizers reached through cold calls. “It wasn’t about networking,” said Rosenthal. “Networking is quid pro quo, leveraged-based relationships that you’re trying to extract value out of. We made incredible friendships.”

Their community grew, and the second Summit Series, held six months later, included some co-founders of Facebook, Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh, the explorer David de Rothschild, and Tim Ferriss, the popular self-help author. At that event, Scott Harrison spoke, a former New York City club promoter that started a nonprofit, Charity Water, which delivers clean drinking water to people in developing nations. “That really opened up everyone at Summit Series to the concept of ‘profit with purpose,’” said Rosenthal. He and the organizers then introduced 35 of the top young entrepreneurs to the Obama Administration — including Twitter’s Evan Williams, Rosenthal said — an occasion that seemed to solidify a central role for Summit Series as facilitators within this community.

In a loftier sense, the organizers of Summit Series see themselves as promoting, or fostering, a set of civic and business virtues — a “favor economy surplus,” as Rosenthal put it — that reflect the idealism of the millennial generation, where perceived social value is measured by the good you’ve done with the dollars you’ve earned. The menu at Squaw, though it included practical advice on matters like “Leading a Family While Leading a Business” and “Innovating at Scale,” was heavily flavored with encouraging personal growth — sessions like “Running a Business with Conscience,” co-led by a senior vice president at Levi Strauss & Company, took place in the same 25-foot geodesic dome as “Deep Night Shaman Ceremony.”

“Summit Series is about character,” Brett Leve, one of Summit’s co-founders, instructed attendees the first afternoon. “It’s not about resumes. So show love to all the startups, and don’t fanboy the big-timers.”

Walking around the conference, one didn’t get the impression of elites ensconced at a ski resort discussing the consolidation of power over a tray of canapés. One afternoon, beside the fireplace in the Resort at Squaw Creek’s glass-walled lobby, California’s Lieutenant Governor Gavin Newsom was holding an impromptu discussion with anyone who was around on how technology can be used in elections, and how crowdsourcing can improve governance. Peter Diamandis, who runs the X Prize Foundation, was talking with “Top Chef” host Tom Colicchio’s business partner about food systems. The 35-year-old founder of a nonprofit that helps North Koreans escape that country was leading a session on “How to Take on a Dictator,” while the Georgia’s Mikheil Saakashvili, the youngest national president in Europe, later spoke about “Tearing Down Tyranny and Building up Democracy.” Elsewhere, one of the Summit Series staff was raising $35,000 for Movember—the moustache growing charity, whose co-founder was also around–by shaving his head.

“It’s like a cacophony of thought leadership, activism, and an entrepreneurial spirit,” said Sekou Andrews, a national poetry slam champion, who performed a motivational spoken word soliloquy at the closing plenary. “It’s the beginning of a congealing. It’s like someone says, ‘You’ve got that B Flat, and that might just go perfect with someone else’s C Sharp, and so forth, and they put us together in a room and we find each other. We start to find the harmonies, and we come out of it with much more of a symphony than we entered with.”

He paused. Behind Andrews, a musician and the founder of a startup were watching a Fortune 500 marketing executive get a haircut. Nearby, a crowd was gathered in rapture around 27-year-old Lior Suchard, an Israeli who, through a combination of mind reading, thought influencing and telekinesis, was bending quarters, reading the serial numbers off dollar bills—while blindfolded—and guessing the name of a stranger’s first love.

“I think the word that has probably been said most,” Andrews said, “is ‘Wow.’”

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